Thursday, 11 March 2010

No Beatles outside Europe

It has been revealed that the short clip of The Beatles, featured in episode one of The Chase, will only be included on the Region 2 DVD's and will be removed from the masters of the discs produced for regions outside Europe.

The short clip of the group playing Ticket to Ride, was taken from the BBC's Top of the Pops programme, and features as part of the sequence where the TARDIS crew look at various events from history on the Time-Space Visualiser.

The music is covered by a blanket agreement for use in the UK but this does not apply to the rest of the world. It may have been possible for the same masters to have been used for the international copies, as there is nothing in the BBC paperwork to indicate that the clip of the Beatles exists in the story. However the distributors have received so many queries about the inclusion of the clip that it became impossible to ignore its presence, so it has been removed from the edit.

In other DVD news, online retailers in the States are reporting the Region 1 DVD release of the animated story Dreamland has been pushed back to October.